This is how conspiracy theories are promulgated: propose an preposterous alternate reality and then find real facts wanting in comparison.

In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.

It's not impossible to crash any car, the alternate reality here is that a brand new car with more safety features than a padded cell crashed by itself at 4:30am in the morning into a tree and exploded on impact. The point is these cars are built to try and avoid these kind of accidents at all cost, the plethora of safety features cars like these have makes it a lot more difficult than say an early 00's vehicle crashing into a tree to hurt anyone inside. Not impossible, but certainly reduces the odds a bit. This article here details the kinds of testing Mercedes put the car through: http://blogs.automotive.com/2013-mercedes-benz-c-class-and-m... - 200 high-speed in-house crashes sounds like a lot of testing for a car and apparently it faired well in all of them. You can see a video of the car being testing here as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvw_VLcUUwU&feature=youtu.be - while Hasting's didn't crash in a controlled environment, you see a picture painted of a car capable of withstanding a lot of impact.

I know it's common for cars to slice down the middle and kill their occupants, but exploding and incinerating Hastings inside to the point they have to identify him by his dental records at least warrants a closer look. I'm not saying foul play is to blame here, but some questions need to be answered. As is common in unexplained plane crashes, the debris should be tested for explosive residue just as a precaution.

Another interesting question is why was the engine found over 100 feet away from the car? When a car crashes isn't an engine pushed back into the cabin, not thrown forwards?

I've yet to see any witness accounts that are consistent with an explosion (and trust me, I've spent a fair amount of time looking). The post crash video looks like an 'ordinary' post crash vehicle fire to me. I don't see any signs of an explosion.

What happens to the engine depends very much on how the impact occurred, and the energies involved. I've seen a handful of wrecks where some substantial piece of the vehicle (engine, transmission, etc) was tossed a long distance. Incidentally, all of those were very high speed collisions, and they all involved at least one fatality. There were all slightly off-axis impacts trees or very solid posts, where the point of impact was about halfway between the midline of the vehicle and one of the front corners.

So I know almost nothing of the circumstances of the crash, but I think there is more to consider. For instance, how fast was he going? My 2006 accord is much safer than some car from the 1950's. But also, I get 260-hp out of a 3 liter engine, and its faster than a Mustang GT from the 90's. If you hit a tree going 90mph, there's little a bunch of airbags will do for you. People dying, things exploding, parts flying - how strange that is really depends on the circumstances of the crash I'd argue.

> its faster than a Mustang GT from the 90's

What?

I have that car and I can attest to it not being incredibly fast. Unfortunately horsepower != speed.

lol. Source: http://www.zeroto60times.com/

1996 Ford Mustang GT 0-60 mph 6.7 Quarter mile 15.1 1999 Ford Mustang GT 0-60 mph 5.4 Quarter mile 13.9 2006 Honda Accord EX (V6) 0-60 mph 5.8 Quarter mile 14.3

Only when they re-designed the GT in the late 90's did it get faster - which isn't really relevant, I was making the general point that modern cars have gotten a ridiculous amount of power, often in a lighter vehicle (e.g. the 2006 honda accord I drive).

> Unfortunately horsepower != speed

Horsepower doesn't give a direct comparison across vehicles, but generally speaking, yes horsepower = speed.

> I have that car and I can attest to it not being incredibly fast.

Perhaps you dont have the v6 manual? Any car that gets to 60mph in under 6 seconds is fast. And again - my comparison with the mustang GT was to paint a picture - we all recognize that as a fast car, and are perhaps surprised that modern sedan's are as fast - and often faster, while typically having a smaller (i.e. lighter) engine. Hell, look at the list of Mercede's on the same site (http://www.zeroto60times.com/Mercedes-Benz-0-60-mph-Times.ht...). There's cars on there coming in the 4 second range.

So - just wanted to point out that without more details, the story isn't complete, and perhaps not as surprising as first-pass suggests.

> When a car crashes isn't an engine pushed back into the cabin, not thrown forwards?

It certainly can be, but considering that he hit a tree -- a narrow object, not like a wall -- I could imagine that if the impact point was not in the center of the car, the tree might not have been directly in front of the engine, and thus it could come out.

Obviously he had to have been going petty fast, though.

More to the point, is the engine being thrown 100 feet somehow more consistent with an assassination plot than with a general high-speed collision? I can't see how it could be.

It could be the result of an explosion near the engine.

How can you possibly assert that the car "crashed by itself" and not because the driver did any number of things to yank the steering wheel and throw the car out of control?

I own a 2006 525i BMW Sedan and I was recently in a situation about 2 months ago where a car pulled out of a side-street as I was passing on a main road, I had no choice but to yank my steering wheel and hard-brake (fortunately no other cars where behind me at the time). The car is 7 years old, but has steering assist which works with the brake assist technology the car has in which the computer takes over both the steering and braking to prevent a spin out and it worked well. The computer actually corrected the steering for me the best it could and stopped the vehicle. I could have easily gone into a power or light pole, but the car prevented it. I was doing 80km/hr which is essentially 50mph. Hastings was going 16km/hr at 60mph faster than what I was so it's not the same, but if a 7 year old BMW can do that, then I'd imagine a 2013 Mercedes would be better (that's just an assumption however).

I am not fuelling conspiracies, I am just trying to say that we should always dig deeper into an unexplained situation like this. Especially one surrounded by controversy. I would actually be interested in hearing what Mercedes has to say about the accident and perhaps even seeing Mercedes trying to replicate the crash using the same car and known data. Because controversy aside, this doesn't bode well for Mercedes' image especially considering Princess Diana suffered a similar fate in a Mercedes at similar speeds, only her Mercedes didn't explode that I am aware of. This is a potential PR disaster for Mercedes, regardless of speeds or safety features of the car perception is what sells car and if a modern Mercedes is perceived as being a moving exploding bomb which isn't a good image for any company to have regardless of what the real facts are.

Those gizmos trade having the car slide instead of spin or flip, they don't break the laws of physics, so be safe out there you don't want to under steer into the oncoming lane someday. Regarding this accident, it's happened that people black-out/pass-out/fall-asleep/have-a-heart-attack/and-so-forth and the weight of their foot on the accelerator - well guess what - accelerates the car.

I believe recent car models, or at least luxury ones, are designed to eject the engine as a safety feature. An engine projected into the cabin sound quite lethal.

Of course, flying car engines don't sound too good for passers-by... oO;

> How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved?

You are massively confused over what airbags do. They don't do anything at all to reduce the chances that one will drive one's car into a tree. They only come into play AFTER an accident has begun.

>You are massively confused over what airbags do. They don't do anything at all to reduce the chances that one will drive one's car into a tree. They only come into play AFTER an accident has begun.

And you are massively confused about why he mentioned the airbags.

Not to point to their assistance of driving a car into a tree, but as items in a large list, pointing to the ridiculous amount of safety measures built into the car.

Cars crash. Expensive cars crash. Cars catch fire after they crash (certainly not in the majority of cases, but it does happen). I'm a Firefighter/EMT in a department that covers a reasonably affluent area. The vehicle Mr. Hastings was driving would not be unusual around here (and vehicles like it would not be unusual to see in the wrecks we respond to).

Your suggestion that somehow being a late model Mercedes makes it impervious to collisions is just silly. I could run a report of our wrecks over the last year, but I'm sure there have been at least a dozen that involve late model cars like the one in question (from various manufacturers). Two of those included at least one fatality. None of them caught fire (but given the small sample size, that's not surprising, over the last decade I'd guess something like 1 in 50 wrecks I've seen involved a post-crash fire).

Regarding the explosion... I've seen nothing that indicates to me that there was an explosion. People described a loud noise (crashes are loud), and a fire. The video of that fire is completely consistent with a post-crash vehicle fire.

The engine came out of the car and was thrown some distance along the sidewalk.

I don't know how fast you'd have to be going to make that happen, but I would guess 70 or 80 mph.

One possibility suggested upthread is that he fell asleep while driving, and given that it was 4:30am I think we have to admit that that is entirely plausible. The weight of his leg could have pressed the accelerator, and in a car like that he could have been doing 70 pretty quickly.

Of course it's not hard to come up with darker possibilities if you want to. He was drugged... his car was tampered with... whatever. I can't rule these out entirely, and under the circumstances I agree that skepticism and further investigation are warranted, but if I had to bet right now, I'd wager he just fell asleep.

(former firefighter) I would look to local and state police for their reports. Any fatal accident with a possibility of foul play, or obvious foul play (DUI, etc) resulted in us assisting the State Police reconstruction team while they processed the scene, measuring and photographing everything to the millimeter, because once we cleaned it up, there was no going back.

That said, I've also seen plenty of crazy vehicle accidents, including fires, many of which are hard to explain how they could have happened. For example, a car where the entire drivers side was smashed into the back seat from driving into a telephone pole. The driver's survival story? "Thank god i wasn't wearing a seatbelt and my car had a bench seat"... She moved over at the last second.

Seatbelts don't always save lives...

Of course they don't, but survival rates for wearing a seatbelt are much higher than survival rates for not wearing a seatbelt.

Personally, I want a 5-point harness if I ever end up driving in a risky fashion.

Agreed. I certainly encourage seatbelt use as I saw far more people saved by using them than not.

At one point we got to a streak of 8 or 9 rollovers with no injuries whatsoever. If the occupants were not wearing seat belts I can say for certain that streak would have ended earlier.

On a positive note, the number of automobile fatalities each year has been on a steady decline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

Lets cool our heads a bit. It's not that "impossible" to crash a modern car with ABS, EBD, TC and ST. I'm a living-breathing evidence to the fact that none of these technologies can do anything if the car hits a paddle of water/sand going too fast around a bend. I'm not saying that this is exactly what happened but do we know that it didn't?

Any number of normal scenarios. An animal on the road is one common one. I have seen a lot of people overcorrect to miss a dog, duck, or other animal on the road. Almost lost an aunt that way (she actually ended up wedged between two trees, a bit to one side and she would have been a goner).

Modern safety features are really good at helping you save a car from crashing if you realize what's happening and react in time.

OTOH, they do absolutely nothing if you are inattentive for a moment at high speed, run off the road, and there is a tree in the way.